Tuesday, 15 November 2016

Donald Trump´s realism and pragmatism with regard to global warming and environmental policy is most welcome after Obama´s ideological crusading. Trump is actually very close to what Bjorn Lomborg and the Copenhagen Consensus has been propagating. John Tierney summarizes in an article in the City Journal: Trump has vowed to ignore the Paris international climate agreement that committed the U.S. to reduce greenhouse emissions. That prospect appalls environmentalists but cheers those of us who consider the agreement an enormously expensive way to achieve very little. Trump’s position poses a financial threat to wind-power producers and other green-energy companies that rely on federal subsidies to survive.During the campaign, DebateScience.org, a consortium of science groups, submitted a questionnaire to the candidates. Hillary Clinton responded to a question about climate change by calling it a “defining challenge of our time” and promising to make America the “clean energy superpower of the 21st century.” Steering clear of this litany of green promises, Trump said merely that there was still “much that needs to be investigated” about climate change. Instead of promising to install a half-billion new solar panels, as Clinton promised to do, Trump offered the kind of perspective found in the Copenhagen Consensus, a group of prominent economists who have concluded that other problems are far more pressing than climate change.“Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources,” Trump said, “should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population. Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels. We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.”